MOAB, Utah – Two’s company, 30 is a crowd, visitors to Delicate Arch have told researchers trying to figure out how to protect the experience of viewing one of Utah’s most famous natural attractions. Using a pilot program that will likely be adopted at other national parks, Arches National Park has developed a method for […]
A delicate question: When is an arch crowded?
Posted inMarch 6, 1995: The fires next time
Motorized beasts are noisy and stinky – and fun
Note: this article is a sidebar to a news story titled “Yellowstone snowmobile crowd may hit limit.” YELLOWSTONE NATIONAL PARK, Wyo. – At 18 degrees below zero, the bison we meet on the road near Fishing Bridge are crusted and draped with frost. We pull our rented snowmobile over to one side and wait for […]
Posted inMarch 6, 1995: The fires next time
Yellowstone snowmobile crowd may hit limit
Yellowstone National Park’s steaming geyser basins and pristine snowscapes used to be practically deserted in winter. But in the last 35 years there has been a veritable explosion of cold-season tourism here. In 1993, winter visitors – most of them on snowmobiles – topped the 143,000 mark, a level park officials had not expected until […]
Posted inMarch 6, 1995: The fires next time
How Montana fouled a family’s water
If they were not so tired, so sad, so damn disgusted, Jan and David Zimmerman might summon enough spite to say, “We told you so.” The Zimmermans, residents of tiny Pony, Mont., learned late last year that cyanide had contaminated their well water. There was no doubt about the poison’s source: A cyanide-process gold mill, […]
Posted inMarch 6, 1995: The fires next time
Logging protesters say they won’t give up
High in Idaho’s snow-clad Nez Perce National Forest, chain saws whine and logging trucks thunder down frozen roads through the night in a frantic effort to fell 8 million board-feet of timber. Downed trees – in stacks higher than ever before seen on the forest, protesters say – tower above the logging trucks. “They’re cutting […]
Posted inMarch 6, 1995: The fires next time
Dear Friends
Odds and ends The Feb. 20, 1995, essay by Jon Margolis – -Waaaaaaaah! The West refuses to be weaned’ – set the telephone to ringing and filled P.O. Box 1090. Rancher Sid Goodloe of Capitan, N.M., argued that it “didn’t have enough class to make the wastebasket beside your desk, much less the back page […]
Posted inMarch 6, 1995: The fires next time
The word according to a weighty Republican
Alaska Republican Don Young, the new chairman of the House Resources Committee, (he removed “Natural” from the committee’s name) recently talked at length with reporter Angela Bouwsma: A congressional committee stumbles on the diversity of life: I’m, by the way, the only member of that (House Resources) committee that ever voted for the Endangered Species […]
Posted inMarch 6, 1995: The fires next time
Democrats resort to banana bread
WASHINGTON, D.C. – The scene was vintage Washington power breakfast: a private room at the Old Ebbitt Grill across from the Treasury Department. The table held plates of bagels and banana bread. The burgundy napkins complemented the Oriental rug and the velvet chairs. Those are the lures reporters expect from a deposed potentate or a […]
Posted inMarch 6, 1995: The fires next time
Pride and Glory of firefighting is hard to resist
The southwest winds brought waves of red smoke streaming into the valley from the fires near Boise and McCall every day last summer. A helicopter would come in overhead, and I’d hear the almost subsonic whump-whump-whump that meant a big craft. The smoke and the morning air and the noise took me back to a […]
Posted inMarch 6, 1995: The fires next time
Bill would fight fire with chain saws
Note: This article is a sidebar to this issue’s feature story, How the West’s asbestos fires were turned into tinderboxes. Like a hotshot smokejumper, Congress has leaped into the debate over forest health and fire. All too predictably, say critics, it is wielding a chain saw. Proclaiming that he wants to “break the cycle of […]
Posted inMarch 6, 1995: The fires next time
Excerpts from South Canyon Fire Accident InvestigationTeam report
Note: This article is a sidebar to this issue’s feature story, How the West’s asbestos fires were turned into tinderboxes. “The fire spotted on the west side directly below the line at the bottom of the drainage. The spot grew quickly and I could see hardhats above it. The spot moved fast. I did not […]
Posted inMarch 6, 1995: The fires next time
Multiple firefighter fatalities in the United States in wildland fires, 1900-present
Note: This article is a sidebar to this issue’s feature story, How the West’s asbestos fires were turned into tinderboxes. No. of fatalities – Year – Location 78 1910 Forest fire, Idaho 25 1933 Griffith Park, Calif. 15 1953 Rattlesnake fire, Mendocino National Forest, Calif. 15 1937 Blackwater, Wyo.,Shoshone National Forest 14 1994 South Canyon […]
Posted inMarch 6, 1995: The fires next time
‘Indifference’ caused deaths
Note: This article is a sidebar to this issue’s feature story, How the West’s asbestos fires were turned into tinderboxes. “I didn’t like going down in there. I talked to Mackey about it. Not burning too active. I was going by his judgment; his best judgment was to go direct. I thought that was the […]
Posted inMarch 6, 1995: The fires next time
Excerpts from Flame and Fortune; Quote from Interior Secretary Bruce Babbitt
Note: This article is a sidebar to this issue’s feature story, How the West’s asbestos fires were turned into tinderboxes. The fire-as-war metaphor fails, as all metaphors must. It fails first because, without a human antagonist, the moral drama centers within people, not between them. Firefighters get killed but don’t kill. The metaphor fails more […]
Posted inMarch 6, 1995: The fires next time
After the fire comes the real devastation
Note: This article is a sidebar to this issue’s feature story, How the West’s asbestos fires were turned into tinderboxes. BOISE – John Thornton, a hydrologist for the Boise National Forest, remembers staring out of the helicopter in disbelief. Below him, a major wildfire was raging, devouring trees and brush. But what caught his eye […]
Posted inMarch 6, 1995: The fires next time
Excerpts from Hellroaring: The Life and Times of a Fire Bum
Note: This article is a sidebar to this issue’s feature story, How the West’s asbestos fires were turned into tinderboxes. I keep an empty turtle shell on the window sill. It’s discolored and peeling, but not from decay. The shell was burned over by a wildfire in Minnesota during the crackling-dry season of 1988. Its […]
Posted inMarch 6, 1995: The fires next time
How the West’s asbestos fires were turned into tinderboxes
BOISE, Idaho – Sluggish all morning, the Rabbit Creek fire swept up the North Fork of the Boise River with a fury Kevin Brown will not soon forget. “It is very difficult to put into words,” said Brown, who was monitoring air traffic from a helicopter over the wildfire last September. “Awesome seems understated,” he […]
Posted inFebruary 20, 1995: No more ignoring the obvious: Idaho sucks itself dry
Grazing fees drop
Only a few months ago, ranchers who graze their animals on federal lands were bracing themselves for significant fee increases proposed by Interior Secretary Bruce Babbitt. But intense pressure from the livestock industry forced Babbitt to jettison the attempt (HCN, 1/23/95). Now, under the federal formula, fees will decline this year by 19 percent, from […]
Posted inFebruary 20, 1995: No more ignoring the obvious: Idaho sucks itself dry
Why bother to save the West?
Ed Marston’s call to save the West (HCN, 12/26/94) was a well-intentioned plea for protecting the population and communities here from the larger forces at work upon them. Sadly, it lacks a historical context and appears to invoke the same type of preservationist mentality that is often damned when it is wielded by environmentalists. Implicit […]
Posted inFebruary 20, 1995: No more ignoring the obvious: Idaho sucks itself dry
Tips for surviving in the New West
I am intrigued by Ed Marston’s statement (HCN, 12/26/94) that “There have been a bunch of studies of this new economy by environmental groups and their economists; almost all welcome it.” The economy of the New West is not necessarily better – just different. It brings with it new opportunities but also new problems. Our […]